Ask HN: How are you hosting email for your startup employees?

Definitely don't do this yourself if you're not familiar with how it works. If you don't set up all the SPF, DMARC, DKIM etc. perfectly, you're going to get terrible deliverability (your outgoing emails will get auto marked as spam).

Just pay Google or Microsoft or Yahoo or whoever to do it for you. Reliable email is not something to skimp on.

Edit: Also, IMHO: gsuite (or whatever they renamed it to) is a huge productivity booster, between meet and groups and drive and docs and calendar and sheets and such, not to mention chrome sync and sign-in with google, etc. And federated management of all of that together in the admin interface, along with integrated legal archival and discovery. Well worth the monthly cost (what is it, like $10?). If your employees aren't worth that much every month, you shouldn't be hiring them.

It's also much more usable cross platforms than the nightmare that is MS Office. Outlook is terrrrrrrrible.

It's a long running meme on /r/webhosting. A person buys "email hosting " somehow, insists they don't need the spend of o365 or Google, loses time and money and ends up on one of those.

For background, the number's coming down these days but not long back I managed a lot of Exchange clusters. I'm not afraid to manage mail, I just know it isn't worth it.

If you're going to be partially or fully on the Microsoft ecosystem (Office most obviously, especially if you're going to be doing document exchange), just go ahead and get M365 Business Premium - along with Office it gets you Azure AD for signins, Onedrive for per user storage, SharePoint for shared storage, email, etc. Premium adds email encryption, plus Intune as a somewhat replacement for domain Group Policy, Windows Defender for Business and IIRC some level of mobile device management. I think BP also includes some level of the data loss prevention tools as well.

If you're on Chromebooks instead, Google's offering obviously makes sense there.

If you're on Macs or pure Linux not sure, but you may end up using web interfaces a fair amount anyway.

AD is ok until you have to get some oddball issue fixed. It’s obtuse, with a mix is old and new (and really old) front ends, and a bajillion options that interact in non-obvious ways. Eventually your salvation will be found in a 17 minute video walkthrough recorded by some Brazilian hacker who happens to mention that you must configure X like so, or Y won’t work.

This is setting up SSO btw. MS management tools are a dumpster fire.

imo, Zoho has got a decent free plan: 5 users, 5GB, incl groups https://mail.zoho.in/signup?type=org&plan=free The only free-plan limitation is you can't IMAP / POP your way to another email client. You'd have to use Zoho's.

The customer support group emails are forwarded from Zoho to Freshdesk (also free for one support email).

Automated emails (like login alerts) are sent from Cloudflare MailChannels / AWS SES; and replies, if any, to those automated emails are routed back in to a Zoho group mail.